The Pratt Institute maintains an excellent collection of bookplates. • Jun 23, 2025

In the middle ages, you could hardly move for Saint's days and feast days. • Apr 17, 2025

For a while, I was quietly obsessed with using up my box of crap promotional ballpoints, half-forgotten biros, and miscellaneous scraps of paper. • Apr 14, 2025

I got really into the story of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám as translated by Edward Fitzgerald when I read about it in Emma Park's article in issue 80 of Idler. • Apr 9, 2025

Trying to do pretty much anything on a mobile browser is starting to feel like pulling teeth. • Mar 28, 2025

I've been through a couple different approaches to keeping track of all the things I want to get done. • Nov 14, 2024

I've been getting occasional push notifications from Airalo, Trainline, and Uber, retailers of e-SIMs, train tickets, and taxi rides, suggesting that I go on holiday. • Jul 19, 2024

While I'm complaining about notifications, I'd like to talk about the system my letting agent uses to handle rent payments. • Jul 19, 2024

Bekah over at TheFrugalGamer.net recently posted 25 Reasons for why plaintext is great. • Jul 18, 2024

I do love a good story, and television is a great medium for storytelling. I especially love a limited series. • Jul 2, 2024

Your technology choices charge interest. Pay less by choosing boring. • Jun 20, 2024

A fun new tool for the toolbelt. • May 3, 2024

What a utopia we could live in if we had more beautiful fonts to choose from without making our pages slower. • Apr 7, 2024

I'm going back and forth on dithering. Will I regret it in ten years? • Apr 5, 2024

I do a lot of writing at work. I'm okay, but not exceptional at it. I hedge too much, I'm too verbose, and I favour an enjoyable turn of phrase over absolute clarity. • Mar 4, 2024

There's an extensive collection of scanned hotel luggage tags available at http://hotel-label.com. I love them. • Feb 26, 2024

The year was 2004 or 2005 and I had been reading about Ultima Online. • Feb 2, 2024

While looking up what a clavier was, I somehow ended up reading Matt Gemmell's 2018 blog post in which he describes the positive effects of buying a mechanical keyboard on his mental wellbeing. • Jan 24, 2024

It doesn't matter how nice the rest of the app is if you can't export your journal entries. • Jan 16, 2024

2023 was a good year for my reading habits. • Jan 15, 2024

Let's stop deliberately surfacing the worst that the internet has to offer. • Jan 9, 2024

My first two phones were the Nokia 1110, and they could store almost nothing. • Jan 2, 2024

Maybe a dictionary lookup shouldn't always come with a visual. • Dec 27, 2023

Walking down memory lane with one of my favourite pieces of software. • Dec 23, 2023

There's a computer science research centre in the German countryside. Life should provide more opportunities to retreat to the ruins of an old castle to study. • Dec 20, 2023

I recently had the good fortune to be introduced to Craig Mod's blog and newsletters. His new book, Things Become Other Things, is extremely well put together. • Nov 27, 2023

Effective stand-up notes, or, "how to not make your team's eyes glaze over." • Nov 24, 2023

I've been having a lot of fun mooning over old technology from the DAK Catalog & Products That Think. • Nov 20, 2023

Tumblr is downscaling its ambitions after failing to reach goals for a new audience, aiming to move some staff members to other divisions of parent company Automattic. • Nov 10, 2023

Ted Gioia, in his post My 12 Favorite Problems • Nov 9, 2023

I was at a book club yesterday and the topic of AI calendar assistants came up. I feel vaguely cold towards them and couldn't articulate why, but here are some loose thoughts. • Nov 7, 2023

When you want to tidy your commit history, but can't be bothered reminding yourself how rebase works. • Oct 4, 2023

Here's how I set up an HTTPS proxy in front of a local service using a self-signed certificate and three lines of Caddy configuration. • Oct 4, 2023

Some handy tools for handling JSON output on the command line. • Sep 27, 2023

A tale as old as time • Sep 13, 2023

I've got a new job. How bittersweet! • Aug 31, 2023

I was trying to install the openssl@2.2.0 gem today with Ruby 3.0.5 and received a very long build error. • Aug 24, 2023

A comment on Addy Osmani's post about choosing boring architecture. • Jul 19, 2023

Put the NO in notifications. • Jun 16, 2023

O, Ruby! • Apr 6, 2023

Good food on cool nights. • Mar 27, 2023

What to try when you're not getting the error message you need. • Mar 7, 2023

I don't know anything about game development, but the PICO-8 sure is neat. • Jan 27, 2023

Software vs. software • Nov 7, 2022

It's difficult to know when to ask for help, so set a timer. • Oct 31, 2022

It's always tempting to write a guide of your own, but sometimes the best thing to do is point people towards existing resources. • Oct 20, 2022

Making things look okay when you don't know how to make things look okay. • Aug 5, 2022

"This is the warmest shade of grey I've ever felt." • Jul 16, 2022

I've been maintaining websites in some form for a long time now, and here's why maybe you should at least think about it. • Jul 16, 2022

On our drawers of stickers that we're afraid to use. • Jul 6, 2022

Just because you can, doesn't mean you should. Misadventures in Ruby programming. • Jul 5, 2022

Sun, sea and simply havin' a good time • Jul 4, 2022

On the narrative forms of software • Jun 28, 2022

Because I literally never want to commit .DS_Store • May 20, 2022

What it says on the tin • May 3, 2022

When (not) to take advantage of some of Ruby's flexibility • Apr 29, 2022

Weighing up the pros and cons of sending interview questions in advance. • Apr 28, 2022

Tripping up when writing unit tests for a custom omniauth strategy • Jan 19, 2022

I use a pretty standard terminal configuration, but there are a couple things I like about it. • Nov 4, 2021

Save time and mental strain by defining custom Rails console methods for common tasks • Oct 25, 2021

Removing my archive of unused docker containers. • Jul 13, 2021

A local newsletter that doesn't worry about the future. • May 6, 2021

Notes from the month of February, 2021. • Feb 28, 2021

Notes from the month of January, 2021. • Jan 31, 2021

I used to get hit in the head a lot. A lot a lot. • Jan 18, 2021

Comparing two styles of boolean assertion in Ruby tests. • Jan 12, 2021

gets is often used in introductory Ruby tutorials, but they rarely tell the whole story. • Jan 7, 2021

Using your SSH configuration to automatically route connections through a jump host. • Jan 4, 2021

Well, well, well. • Jan 3, 2021

While the Single Responsibility Principle is touted as a universal good, how small is too small? • Jan 2, 2021

Notes from the last month of a questionable year. • Dec 31, 2020

Notes from the month of November, 2020. • Nov 30, 2020

October's unsorted notes. • Oct 31, 2020

Monitoring command output with the linux 'watch' command. • Oct 13, 2020

Notes from September 2020. • Sep 30, 2020

Notes from the month of June, 2020. • Jun 30, 2020

Notes from the month of May, 2020. • May 31, 2020

On the 6th March 2020, I became a certified AWS Cloud Practitioner. Here are the steps I took. • May 12, 2020

Long branch names were causing problems in our CI. Here's how to head them off at the pass. • Apr 1, 2020

I recently had one of those moments where some code failed, but not in the way I expected it to. • Nov 30, 2019

It's been a few months since I've started my new job, and I am having a whale of a time. • Nov 8, 2019

Something I didn't think needed to be said. • Aug 28, 2019

It's been a wild couple months. Here's a few of the things I've been up to. • Jul 29, 2019

Implementing simplified ActiveRecord relations using macros. • Jun 5, 2019

A call for calm. • Mar 10, 2019

Finding the source of syntax errors in Rails 4's JS Uglifier • Mar 6, 2019

The web is yours. • Feb 27, 2019

A wonderfully presented tome of hot tips to take your design chops to the next level. • Feb 25, 2019

I spent the bulk of January getting rid of stuff and it made me happier. • Feb 5, 2019

In 2017 I took Ben Orenstein's Code Quality Challenge. Here are my notes. • Jan 22, 2019

A small project I made got way more attention than I expected and I had to learn some things about being the maintainer of an open source project. • Nov 1, 2018

A good programmer is going to end up asking a lot of questions. Here's how to make that a painless process for both you and your team mates. • Oct 20, 2018

Quitting coffee and visiting the Thought Bubble comic festival in this month's roundup. • Sep 30, 2018

If you want to progress without friction, you need to be kind to your future self. • Feb 13, 2018

Everyone has slow days. Or weeks. Or months. It's important to know how to give yourself a reset and get back into gear. • Jan 24, 2018

Seriously such a good career. For me, anyway. Here's a few reasons why. • May 17, 2017

Questions to ask before development begins. • May 6, 2017

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• Nov 25, 2016

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When did that happen? • Feb 13, 2015

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